


Burning Out

by mogwai_do



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s03e13 Last of the Time Lords, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-02
Updated: 2013-01-02
Packaged: 2017-11-23 10:14:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/621003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mogwai_do/pseuds/mogwai_do
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Episode tag for Last of the Time Lords</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Out

He watches the flames lick higher and the heat beating against his face and chest makes the rest of him feel all the colder. The tears have gone now, scorched from his skin by the pyre, he doesn't have any more left to shed. The humans are waiting for him; he should give them their names, they deserve at least that much from him, but he can't do it. Human is what they are. It's an odd realisation: it's not that he's ever really felt like one of them, he's always been aware of the differences, of their fragility, but it hadn't mattered. There hadn't been anyone else to challenge that easy association.

He shifts slowly, feeling a stiffness in every muscle that has nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with reluctance. The body is a vague shape half-hidden in the fire, not really even much of a body anymore. Like a spring wound too far, it's suddenly too much and he turns away sharply. After the brightness of the flames his eyes are slow to adjust and the sudden absence of heat to his face makes him shiver. He can see the madly flickering dance of the firelight surrounding him, his own shadow stretching out into the darkness before him. He tries not to think of it as a metaphor for the rest of eternity.

The skin of his face is cooling now and he closes his eyes shutting out the sting of the smoke, the empty night and the reality that is 'now'. After a second more he closes his inner eye too, the one unique to his species and now unique only to him. He can't block it out entirely, but for a little while the roar of passing time is muted. It leaves him with only the past, which doesn't exist anymore than the future does really, but it's the memories that make the difference. Knowledge isn't the same thing at all and for a moment even he can't measure he is there.

_He can feel a dozen book spines cushioning his back even as the shelf on which they lie digs in beneath his shoulder blades. Neither the past nor the future can account for the way they act, a kind of desperate determination that belies their centuries of knowledge and experience. They don't care, there's no-one left to judge them - the two most notorious outcasts of their people and ironically the only remaining arbiters of that ancient society. He can feel the press of another body against his own, not the fevered heat of humanity, but the like-warmth of his own reflected back at him. The taste of another's lips and tongue and breath leave him shaken, licking wet lips and hungry in a way he hasn't let himself feel in so long. He was always taught that telepathy was a subtle skill and he knows the other learned the same lessons, but there's nothing of finesse in the way his mental shields come down and he reaches out, clutching at the other's mind and feeling it cling to him in return. It's almost too intimate to bear - a pair of tar-babies too much alike to ever admit it, wrapped around each other, too scarred and broken to ever be whole by themselves._

His eyes snap open and he takes a sharp indrawn breath. He can still feel the phantom touch of sure hands and the ragged ends of a telepathic embrace that never was. He feels raw, abraded, scraped hollow. The heat at his back hasn't ebbed yet, but he doesn't turn around, he can't. They'll be waiting for him, the humans: Jack and Martha and all the others who had depended on him and for the briefest instant he wishes he could hate them all. But he can't and it leaves him wearier than he can ever remember being. 

He's too tired to stay until the fire burns out, too afraid of disappointment to search the ashes for what he wants to believe is there. His hand curls around the teleport trigger; he can't remember what it feels like to have faith, maybe he'll ask the humans who put such store in him, but he doubts it. He lets his eyes slip closed and isn't surprised to find himself reaching after the lingering remnants of a memory that isn't his from a future he wants too much to believe in.

The flames of the pyre ebb in a sudden gust of wind, but he thumbs the teleport device before his resolution not to look can falter. They're waiting for him when he returns; a people to whom he doesn't belong and never will, but for now they're enough.

FIN


End file.
